Kehry Lane with Better Ballot Iowa presented at the Mount Vernon-Lisbon unit of the Linn County League of Women Voters “learn with the league” event about ranked choice voting Wednesday, Feb. 26. More than 25 citizens attended the event.
Lane explained his reason for getting involved In Better Vote Iowa and promoting ranked choice voting was to help voters build more consensus as opposed to the caustic nature of our politics currently.
As an exercise, Lane asked attendees to rank their preference of ice cream flavors between strawberry, chocolate, blueberry and lime sherbet on different colored Post-It notes. When people had them arranged in their preferential order, those votes were then sorted to find when they had a majority of vote recipients.
Chocolate had 12 of 25 responses on the first ballot, while blueberry was the lowest vote recipient and knocked out of the election, so those voters second choices were then picked to find a majority winner. That gave chocolate the overall win in just one round.
When it came to what people disliked about current elections, attendees said the continuation of polarization and extremism, the two-party system, the power money has over the election, people being siloed from information.
Lane then asked what people would want to see in politics if they could change them. People identified public financing, a shorter campaign cycle, ability for more parties to make it to the ballot, more cooperation and compromise to be seen and respectful communication.
Lane said many of the things people want to see in politics could be achieved by ranked choice voting.
“The majority of elections across the United States are uncompetitive,” Lane said. “The districts favor incumbents of any party, so when they get in power they stay in power. It leads to many people wondering what’s the point of an election if the outcome is already a given?”
Adding to that issue, is the party primary systems, which funnel choices down from multiple candidates to one strong candidate.
“Only 10 percent of voters in a party take part in voting in the primary,” Lane said.
With districts so safe for candidates, it leads many who were voted in not to feel accountable to all of their constituents. With many Iowans aligning themselves as independents and not tied to a party, it also forces them to sit on the sidelines when those primary elections whittle down alternative choices they may have liked.
“It leads to Urban Republicans, rural Democrats and those supporting a third-party candidate to feel underrepresented,” Lane said.
With limited choices and uncompetitive elections, new and different ideas that people want to see happen get crowded out and negativity gets awarded in the current system. A two party system really is not designated to handle more than two strong candidates in any election, so when you have more than two candidates with strong showings, things quickly go awry. That leads to run-off elections if certain people do not meet thresholds, which equate higher costs for elections.
With ranked choice voting, more candidates end up campaigning in a general election. Voters rank candidates based ontheir preference.
Lane said as human beings, we already do this in our own lives on a day to day basis, like when we are shopping in a chip aisle and choosing our preferred chips. Ranked choice voting is no different than an instant run-off election, as the results are tabulated until a candidate has he majority of support from all voters.
Lane said that voting machines in 97 of Iowa’s 99 counties would be compatible with ranked choice voting, it would just require updating software and educating the electorate about the changes.
The bill is currently one the legislature hasn’t put in as a priority, and in order for it to move forward, more people need to discuss moving ranked choice voting forward.
“We’re not out to ruin everyone’s day, we’re out to make things better,” Lane said. “But we need you. We need lots of volunteers to help get this talked about at the state.”
When Lane was asked why people may be opposed to this, Lane said usually it is incumbents who worry about the change.
When it comes to the election machines, Lane said the change would impact the software inside the machines, not the machines themselves.
“We’ll still want paper ballots so that all elections can be audited,” Lane said.
There would be a slight cost for each ranked choice voting election for those specialists to oversee it, but the cost would be minimal compared to the cost of run-off elections.
Lane said there are some who already are buying in on supporting the election, but the organization is looking to get more between now and when this officially gets more momentum in the state.